Pandora's Box
by ncfan
Summary: The urge to pull her in still lingers, but Lisa knows she can't. Post-chapter 422.


**Characters**: Lisa, Nanao**  
Summary**: The urge to pull her in still lingers, but Lisa knows she can't. Post-chapter 422.**  
Pairings**: None**  
Warnings/Spoilers**: Spoilers for Fake Karakura town arc**  
Timeline**: Post-chapter 422**  
Author's Note**: Obviously, this will have to disregard the ending of my oneshot _Something Like Family_, but the theory I presented there is the same here. This is _not_ Lisa x Nanao; if you read _Something Like Family_, you'll understand why I write Lisa's reactions and feelings towards Nanao the way I do.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

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They meet again in a Seireitei hospital. The walls are practically throbbing with activity, and Lisa can hear people running around outside, in a frenzy and a panic. There have been many casualties and the hospital is full and busy, humming like a beehive. The Fourth Division won't be getting much sleep tonight.

Lisa sighs slightly as she flips back the pages of a magazine with long, nimble fingers. Her bandages, wrapping all the way around her torso, itch unbearably, but she knows better than to scratch. The bindings are so tight that it makes it hard to breathe, just a little bit. That's fitting, she decides.

Finally, she drops the pretense of reading and lets the magazine fall to the floor, staring blankly at the opposite wall with cool jade eyes, burning holes into the door. Her body screams with the need to get up and do something, and she can't so much as move an inch.

The man who made her life hell is finally dead, and though she can't be unhappy to glean this little piece of information, Lisa does wish that she had been able to be the one to slide her nodachi through his ribs, like a steak knife carving bits of meat off of a hunk of flesh, until so much blood spurts out, warm and ruddy and _delicious_, that there wouldn't be anything left in the empty husk.

Lisa rubs her temple as the inner voice starts to speak up again. The sinuous voice, as unlike a Hollow as she ever expected, doesn't rely on brute force and terror as she knows the inner Hollows of her fellow Vizard do. Instead, she somehow ended up with the inner Hollow that likes to engage in behavior much more insidious. Her hateful voice, instead of going the direct path, prefers, even delights in engaging in subliminal manipulation, worming its way into her thoughts until Lisa can't begin to tell where the Hollow ends and she begins.

And Lisa can't remember a time when she didn't have to push down bloodlust, though she knows, with an objective knowledge that doesn't connect to memory, that there was a time.

_God_, that spider's suggestions really are pervasive.

Aizen Sousuke is dead, but what he did to her is still with her, remains a reality, a threat, a living nightmare to one Yadomaru Lisa, and all of her Vizard brethren.

Another soft sigh jumps up the walls as Lisa wonders when she'll finally be let out. This place, this world, isn't hers anymore. It isn't home anymore, nowhere's really home, and Seireitei is a casket of painful memories that's been loosed like Pandora's box.

Another Pandora's box opens up when the door creaks open.

Lisa tilts her head slightly, incurious (she was told that she the next checkup wouldn't be until next morning; it's still night, the open window revealing stars and a crescent moon with a hazy blue nimbus), as a small, translucent hand with fragile bones and thin fingers presses open the door.

A voice calls from down the hall, and a woman, the woman just outside the door, answers. "I know; I cleared it with Unohana-taicho."

A small pause, and the woman who's pushed open the door answers. "Okay."

Lisa's curiosity peaks slightly, wondering who there is left to visit her in this place of ill memory.

Her stomach drops when her visitor steps through the threshold, pausing to close the door behind her.

The woman, a young woman looking barely out of her teens, has a face that could nearly be a mirror image of Lisa's own. Same fine, chiseled bones, though slightly more softly fashioned than Lisa's hard face; this face has a hardness of its own, but different. Soft hair as black as ink, so dark it shines blue, is probably very long but is pinned up behind the woman's head, severely, only letting her bangs on one side of her face fall to soften her sharp cheekbones. Blue-violet eyes, wide and softly shaped, are shielded by wire-rimmed glasses.

Lisa sinks back in her bed, sick and weary, as Nanao checks the door and locks it, clearly intending that they not be disturbed. Of course, she'd be a fool not to recognize who's walked right through the door.

_She's smaller than I thought she'd be. _Lisa eyes slight shoulders and frail, fluted wrists, a shihakusho that hangs loose on a small frame, lips thinning. And she notices the badge tied to the thin left arm.

"You've risen," Lisa comments, unable to keep a brittle tone out of her voice, despite wanting to inject so many other things into her voice. A fine eyebrow rises, and Lisa wonders why she can't feel more. "Where's your zanpakuto?" she questions coolly.

_What the hell? What's wrong with me? I'm seeing her again for the first time in over a hundred years, and all I can think to say is 'Where's your zanpakuto?'_

_Why can't I feel more? Why am I so numb?_

Nanao starts slightly—clearly, the inquiry startles her just as much as it does Lisa—and reaches to her left sleeve, rolling up the voluminous black linen. "Here," she answers simply. The zanpakuto, the same thin-bladed wakizashi Lisa remembers, is strapped to Nanao's arm; Lisa can see the hilt and a little bit of the scabbard that covers the blade; the rest is hidden.

Lisa squeezes her eyes shut tightly for just a moment, fighting away the burning. She can remember a time when Nanao was so small that if she carried her zanpakuto, it would drag the ground. Now, she's gotten so big that she can hide it away up her sleeve.

Time has flown on. Lisa's been thrown out of the river.

"So I guess you finally got your zanpakuto to talk to you, Nanao?" It's the first hint that the mask of Lisa's skin is, indeed, just a mask, as her voice cracks and the raspy tones get thick and gluey, the words stuck in her throat.

And still, Lisa can't bring herself to add the suffix –chan on, as she used to. Nanao's not a little girl anymore, and she's the lieutenant of the Eighth Division to top it off; it's not appropriate to call her "Nanao-chan". But Lisa's never been terribly concerned with propriety, not where close people are concerned. Out of all the words that came unstuck, "chan" refused to leave her throat; Lisa can't bring herself to form the single syllable, can't bring her lips to let it fly.

It would just make things so much harder.

Nanao can't ignore the change that comes over her former lieutenant; her bluish eyes grow over-bright. "Yes." Her voice is horribly quiet, hushed and whispered to hide any sort of trembling. Said voice quavers. "Yes."

Words hang and fall into atrophy. Soft yet raucous sounds float up into the window, as far off the ground as the fifth floor is. Celebrations, wild and heartfelt happy, are taking place all through Seireitei; likely they'll continue long into the night, and maybe into the morning as well. But neither Lisa nor Nanao are in a particularly festive mood.

"I…would have come sooner." Nanao's words fall flat and lame, and Lisa is painfully reminded of the child she used to be, suddenly, ridiculously, wishing Nanao could become that child again. "…But Kyouraku-taicho wouldn't attend to any of the division's paperwork, and it couldn't wait until morning."

Lisa nods, and takes in the sight of Nanao's hands, so thoroughly stained with bluish-black ink, showing up as purple on her fingernails like lacquer, that she looks like a scholar, locked away all day in dusty rooms with her old, fading books.

"He was always awful about that," Lisa remarks, momentarily growing so detached and far away that she can be offhand, feeling like she's floating above the room, watching the conversation of two people who mean nothing to her.

Silence flickers on.

"He still is," Nanao half-whispers, and the look in her eyes as she stares at Lisa is terrible to behold.

It's not angry, not furious, not enraged. There's not even the tone of betrayal or abandonment. It would be so much easier if Nanao would just lose her temper and scream, demand answers, vent her anger into catharsis and get all of their emotions. But she doesn't. She won't even give Lisa that satisfaction.

Instead, Nanao's eyes hold a strange longing. It's visceral in its intensity, agonizing in its burning. She doesn't dare act on it, doesn't step forward, doesn't even reach out a hand.

_She doesn't think she has any claim on you, remember? _Lisa tells herself bitterly. _You never gave her any reason to believe that she did, despite knowing what you knew._

God, what is she supposed to do now?

Nanao opens her thin, small pink mouth again, wetting her lips slowly with the flick of a mauve tongue. She tries to smile, but can't quite manage it. Black lashes, long and thick, come down over fluid indigo eyes.

"Welcome home, Yadomaru-fukutaicho," Nanao murmurs dully, voice one step away from breaking.

Lisa stares at her for a moment, hands twisting the bed sheets in white, livid knuckles. Then, reality hits her, cold and hard.

_It's not home! _she wants so badly to wail. _Don't you see that? This can never be home to me anymore._

And the urge to reach out and pull her in and close still lingers on, half the spider's thought and half her own, but Lisa knows, knows as she can't go home, that she can not. There's too much risk that Nanao, frail, fragile, _real_ Nanao, finally real again after so many years of dreaming of her, might break in the grip of what Lisa's become.


End file.
